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Before the delta, there was the city. Narrow alleys. Faded walls. A child’s laughter that echoed. A shutters too brittle to close properly. They had lived in Saigon long enough for the neighbors to forget when they had arrived, but not long enough for the government to stop watching.
The father—Trương—had been gone for a time. Reeducation, they called it. Just over a year. Less than most. He returned thinner, quieter. He spoke softly, if at all, and only raised his voice when startled. His wife, Bình Minh, had kept the house running in his absence, her
steadiness a kind of quiet resistance. Their daughters, An and Vui, had learned to read the mood in a room before they learned to read books.
In the months that followed his return, Trương tried to move with caution, but caution did not keep eyes from watching. Not in that part of the city. And so one morning, without
ceremony, they packed what they could into a weathered cloth bag and boarded a southbound truck before the tea stalls opened.
A cousin had a house in Phong Điền—a district where the rivers curved and widened like arms at rest. The house leaned slightly east, as if the land itself remembered a storm from long ago. But it was shelter. It was far. And it was not Saigon.
They came in search of something softer than fear. Not freedom, exactly. Just quiet. Just peace. Something that could grow slowly, like rice or trust.
The place where the water bends held its own kind of silence. But not the kind that punished. The kind that waited.
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